The Caribbean's Best-Kept Jewish Secret: Rabbi Avromy & Sternie Super

00:00 Speaker 1 For Rabbi Avromi Super, there's no such thing as a Jew who's too far away, especially before Pesach.

00:08 Speaker 2 If there's no local shliach, I, I'll ship the matzah.

00:10 Speaker 1 Super lives on the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, where he and his wife Stirni serve a Jewish community of about 200 people. But about three years ago, Super was reviewing his list of people he sends shmurah matzah to before Pesach.

00:26 Speaker 2 So I came to my two, three Jews that are in Guyana.

00:29 Speaker 1 Guyana is a South American country about 600 miles south of Saint Lucia. Super had briefly met Jews there as he made the rounds during a brief stopover from the US, but he never forgot them.

00:42 Speaker 2 So I, I go to the local FedEx, and I kid you not, FedEx wanted $600 to ship the matzah. So I figured I can do this for cheaper. I book a flight with British Airways, half the price, and I go there, and I deliver the matzah in person.

00:54 Speaker 1 Serving the Jewish community of Saint Lucia keeps the Supers plenty busy. So what motivates Super to help people he barely knows in other parts of the world? I'm Gary Wolk, and this is Lamplighters, stories from Chabad emissaries on the Jewish frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad house are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances, and a community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories. Back to our story in a moment, but first, I'd like to tell you about a great opportunity. You can partner with Lamplighters in sharing stories of Chabad emissaries doing amazing work all over the world. Please consider dedicating an episode. You can email us at podcast@lubavitch.com to explore dedication opportunities. That's podcast@lubavitch.com. You can also let us know how we're doing and about the shluchim you think we should consider for upcoming episodes. Please rate and review Lamplighters to make it easier for other podcast listeners to find us. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.

02:35 Speaker 2 I always knew I wanted to be a shliach.

02:37 Speaker 1 Rabbi Avromi Super knew that even when he was growing up in a Lubavitch household in Melbourne, Australia.

02:44 Speaker 2 I, I don't remember when it happened, but I always wanted to do this since I'm a young boy.

02:48 Speaker 1 With that in mind, Super attended yeshiva in Melbourne, Detroit, Israel, Montreal, New York, and Morristown, New Jersey. He went out on Merkosh Shlichus in Africa, Hawaii, and Vermont. He earned smicha in Morristown in 2014. Stirni Super grew up in what she calls the small shtetl in Postville, Iowa.

03:13 Speaker 3 And my father was working for Washkins in the meat industry, and it was a very united community and very family-oriented.

03:23 Speaker 1 But it was Stirni's experience abroad that inspired her to consider a life on the Jewish frontier.

03:29 Speaker 3 I went to seminary in Milan, Italy. There are a lot of shluchim, very amazing shluchim there, and decided that that's what I wanna do.

03:36 Speaker 1 Stirni taught and ran holiday programs during her three years in Milan, alongside the shluchim there. Then she worked for Chabad houses in Manhattan Beach and Long Island. Avromi and Stirni Super met in 2015. Shlichus was a main discussion topic on their dates.

03:56 Speaker 2 Yeah, so that was one of the requirements, someone who wanted to go on shlichus.

04:01 Speaker 3 We were both, like, willing to live anywhere, but we didn't, like, have a specific location in mind.

04:07 Speaker 2 We'll go anywhere, wherever we're needed.

04:12 Speaker 1 The Supers were married in August 2015 in Crown Heights. They lived there for a year, then moved to Nairobi, Kenya to work at East Africa's very first Chabad center, but-

04:24 Speaker 3 We decided that we want to work on our own and open up our own place from the beginning.

04:29 Speaker 1 The Supers moved to Miami and kept their eyes open for a permanent gig.

04:34 Speaker 3 My husband literally dropped pins on Google and would research the place, call shluchim nearby, find out if it's a place that could have shluchim. So there was quite a few people that knew we're looking for a shlichus.

04:46 Speaker 1 And then in late 2017, a breakthrough.

04:50 Speaker 2 We, uh, were told of a, uh, a Jewish family in Saint Lucia who had called different shluchim in the area, and they had- were really pushing for a Chabad to come to the island.

05:00 Speaker 3 And my husband called Rabbi Zarchi, who's the head shliach of the Caribbean, to get his okay to go check out Saint Lucia. So, uh, yeah, two days later, we were on a plane to Saint Lucia with nothing much prepared. We just bought menorahs, and we were off.

05:13 Speaker 1 In December of 2017, the Supers set foot on Saint Lucia for the first time. They were picked up at the airport by the family who had requested them. They whisked the Supers to a hotel for a Hanukkah party and menorah lighting.

05:28 Speaker 2 And people started coming in. And we were about to light, and a bus pulls into the lobby, and out walks three more Jewish families. And what started with one family was ended up with 20 people.

05:38 Speaker 1 Which was more than the Supers had expected.

05:40 Speaker 2 Turns out the chef of the hotel was Jewish, and one family told us that they had booked their trip to Saint Lucia, and they didn't realize it was gonna be Hanukkah. And on the flight, their kids realized that they're gonna miss Hanukkah. And the parents said, "Don't worry, we'll, we'll figure out. We'll celebrate Hanukkah when we get there somehow." And they walk out of the bus, check into the hotel, and there we are standing in the lobby.

06:00 Speaker 1 After Hanukkah, the Supers returned home to Miami. They sent yeshiva students to lead Purim and Pesach services in early 2018 and returned to that summer for a Shabbos celebration. They moved permanently to Saint Lucia right before Rosh Hashanah. They fell in love with the island and its community right away

06:21 Speaker 3 And it's a gorgeous island

06:23 Speaker 2 There's trees and greenery everywhere. The ocean's beautiful

06:27 Speaker 3 It's full of mountains

06:28 Speaker 2 I mean, it's, it's a stunning place to live

06:32 Speaker 1 And St. Lucia's Jewish community is a unique one. The island's natural beauty makes it one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. About 180,000 people make the island their permanent or semi-permanent home. When they first arrived, the Supers had known of about 100 Jews

06:50 Speaker 2 So we knew going in that the permanent Jewish community is very small. The local Jewish community is very, very unaffiliated. There are a handful of people that both husband and wife are Jewish. Most people are very secular. Think of it, who moves to an island that has no Jewish community, that has no shul, that has no Jewish infrastructure? But we were there to provide that

07:14 Speaker 1 The Supers' first initiative was to meet every Jew as quickly as they could. It began with a Rosh Hashanah dinner and Shabbos

07:22 Speaker 3 And it turned into coffee dates and going to give them challah or donuts and Menorah, anything whenever we could, any way to connect with them

07:33 Speaker 1 The more Jews the Supers met, the more they heard about others. Sometimes finding those people required some good old-fashioned sleuth work

07:43 Speaker 2 Someone told me, "You've got to find this Jewish woman. Her name is Margalit, and she's a primary school teacher in this small little fishing village on the south of the island." So I asked around. No one knew her. I, I thought obviously this information was either really old information or she doesn't exist

08:00 Speaker 1 They looked three years for the mystery woman to no avail. Months later, Super hired two yeshiva bochurs to help out in the community. One day, they told him they were going to the mall a short block from the Chabad House to find some Jews

08:17 Speaker 2 I said, "Great, enjoy." What are the chances they're gonna find new people that I never met at the mall? Extremely low, but lo and behold, a couple hours later, they, uh, walking back to my house, and I see them through the kitchen window, and, uh, there's this guy with them. He's got shorts, a sleeveless shirt, long dreadlocks, and they walk into the house, and they said, "Uh, we met this guy, and, uh, he's local St. Lucian. I mean, he says he's Jewish." So we put on tefillin, and he told me his story. He was born in Israel, and, uh, as a young kid, his mother married a local St. Lucian guy, and he had moved to St. Lucia, and he grew up in a small little fishing village in the south called Micoud. And then it hit me. I said, "I once heard about this woman called, uh, Margalit. Do you know her?" And I see tears coming from his eyes, and he says, "Yeah, she was my mother."

09:07 Speaker 1 Sadly, Margalit had passed away. Super learned that she had come to the island 40 years prior when there were almost no Jews there, but also that she had planted some seeds of Yiddishkeit for her family, which the Supers have nurtured

09:21 Speaker 2 I'm happy to say today he puts on tefillin regularly and is a regular member of our community. But all these years later, her kids are finally home, and her kids are part of the community

09:32 Speaker 4 My name is Rena Southern.

09:34 Speaker 5 I'm Andrew Southern

09:36 Speaker 1 The Southerns were born in and raised in the New York area. They married in 2006. In 2014, they left New York for St. Lucia with their two young children

09:47 Speaker 5 And just on a whim, we said, "Well, we're only going for a year." And actually, before the first year was up, we said, "Let's stay on another year because this is great." It's a natural environment, very safe, very healthy, and we ended up staying for 10 years

10:01 Speaker 1 A few years ago, Andrew was out doing errands when he spotted an exotic species, even by St. Lucia standards, a rabbi

10:11 Speaker 5 And I said, "Really?" And then I think we had a couple more sightings

10:15 Speaker 1 That led to a face-to-face meeting and, of course, a dinner invitation. The Southerns began to see Rabbi Super's almost supernatural talent

10:25 Speaker 4 That guy is incredible at sniffing out people who have some connection to Judaism and bringing everyone together. Absolutely incredible at it. I mean, the people that he gathered, there were some, like, Rastas at our Shabbat dinners. Turns out that their great-grandmother-

10:44 Speaker 5 Yeah

10:44 Speaker 4 ... came from England and had a Jewish great-grandmother, and-

10:48 Speaker 5 He had already assembled people that we had never seen on this island-

10:52 Speaker 4 Right

10:52 Speaker 5 ... and right away was creating a community where there was none. And small gestures and a light touch can really help bring people into something that they may have been avoiding

11:07 Speaker 1 Andrew Southern says he and Rena and their children became more involved with Jewish learning and practice as a result, which has led to some unforgettable memories. Andrew fondly remembers the day in late 2021 when Rabbi Super called him with a compelling invitation

11:26 Speaker 5 Avromi has this large metal menorah that he brings around to some of the resorts during Hanukkah.

11:35 Speaker 4 It's like six, seven feet.

11:37 Speaker 5 It's, it's re- pretty big. It has a big, heavy base. And Avromi said, "I wanna take the menorah up Gros Piton."

11:45 Speaker 1 At 2,600 feet high, Gros Piton is the larger of two volcanic spires that are St. Lucia's most recognizable natural features. Rabbi Super and crew decided to make the eight-hour round trip on the eighth day of Hanukkah. It's not an easy hike

12:03 Speaker 5 So we devised this plan where Avromi, and he had two rabbinical students with him, myself, and my son, along with some guides. And so we all show up early one morning, and we've got this big menorah, and we go up for four hours- ... and we get to the top of this thing, and Avromi screws it all together and puts it, like, right in the center of everyone's picture, where you would get to the top and then you'd take a picture. And, uh, it's very windy up there, but he's able to light it, and it made for fantastic photos, fantastic stories.

12:38 Speaker 3 We've hiked the Piton since with some of the guides, and they all are like, "Remember when?"

12:44 Speaker 5 It was a really memorable day. This was a memorable one.

12:49 Speaker 1 These days, the Southerns live in Savannah, Georgia, while their kids finish high school, and the family awaits the completion of their new home in St. Lucia. But they're still not beyond the long reach of the Supers. About three years ago, the Supers dropped by Savannah for a visit on a trip to the East Coast. The Supers just happened to have a mezuzah for the Southern's front door.

13:13 Speaker 3 We love Avromi and Stirni, and we are very grateful to have them in our lives, in our Jewish lives.

13:22 Speaker 1 Actually, Andrew isn't Jewish, but he appreciates the opportunity to learn and to support his wife and kids.

13:28 Speaker 5 They have been there for some really important milestones.

13:32 Speaker 1 Those kids are now 17 and 15 years old. Rabbi Super was there for their bar and bat mitzvah in Jerusalem and upstate New York.

13:41 Speaker 3 Because Avromi is our rabbi. Andrew likes to brag to people that we have our own personal rabbi. Um, so that-

13:47 Speaker 5 We, we imported a rabbi to Jerusalem.

13:50 Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly.

13:53 Speaker 1 Traveling to and from St. Lucia, the US, and Israel makes for a full travel docket, but Avromi Super refuses to let distance determine the limits of his responsibility. He also makes the rounds in Antigua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and other stops in the Caribbean, and even in South America.

14:13 Speaker 5 Guyana has never had a shul. There's no Jewish cemetery there.

14:16 Speaker 1 Guyana, a small country on the northern coast of South America, has never had a Chabad house either, but that was all the more reason Super went looking for Jews on a stopover there a few years ago. He found one right away.

14:30 Speaker 5 And we put on tefillin, and he's crying. He told us that he hasn't put on tefillin in decades, probably 50 years since he moved to Guyana, and that started my connection to Guyana.

14:39 Speaker 1 Since then, Super has met more Guyanese Jews who needed matzah, tefillin, Shabbos candles, and other necessities. He keeps a list of the people he's met and what their needs are, and he keeps looking for more. Super had heard that Guyana's sixth president, Janet Jagan, was Jewish. She passed away in 2009, but Super went looking for her children about three years ago.

15:06 Speaker 5 So I started asking the local Jews, "Does she have any kids? Who are her kids?" And they said, "Nah, they're not Jewish." I said, "What do you mean they're not Jewish?" And they said, "Listen, she never identified as being Jewish. She didn't raise her kids as Jewish. She didn't get a Jewish burial, and then th-that's it."

15:22 Speaker 1 Undeterred, Super kept looking. He found that Jagan's son, Cheddi, named for his father, who was the fourth president of Guyana, was living and working in the capital city of Georgetown. So he looked up his address.

15:35 Speaker 5 I get to his office. I figured I'm gonna have to make a dental appointment, and he'll clean my teeth, and then as he's cleaning my teeth, I'll ask him if he wants a box of matzah. So I, I come to the reception. I said, um, "Is Dr. Jagan here?" And the secretary says yes. She goes to the back, and she comes out a minute later. She says, "He wants to see you." I come into his office, and we get talking. Turns out he's very proud of his Jewish heritage, and he loves Israel, and he told me how much he wants to go visit. And it was a few months after October 7th, and he told me, "If you would've come here a few months before, I wouldn't have been interested in seeing you. But ever since October 7th, I've changed my whole position, and I'm very pro-Israel, and I'm, I wanna connect to my Jewish heritage." And we put on tefillin together, and we gave him matzah, and, uh, he's the proudest Jewish person you've ever met, and now we have a whole community growing in Guyana.

16:25 Speaker 1 Super is confident that Guyana will one day have its own Chabad house. Until then, he'll continue to plant seeds there and elsewhere.

16:33 Speaker 5 At the end of the day, I'm a shliach, and shliach's job doesn't end where his geographic boundaries end. So wherever I go, I try to meet Jews.

16:43 Speaker 1 The Supers say that back in St. Lucia, they come into contact with over 5,000 Jewish tourists a year.

16:50 Speaker 5 So we'll stand outside the cruise ship. I'll go there, and I'll set up a tefillin stand, and I'll meet the Jews. So 'cause they're with Lulav and Esrog in Purim, read Megillah at the cruise ships, so we try to reach those people that, that may just be visiting for a few hours, and there's an opportunity to connect to another Jew, to give them Shabbos candles, to put on tefillin with them.

17:07 Speaker 1 Those brief encounters on St. Lucia can forge connections that span continents and even oceans. Stirni Super remembers one early encounter before one Pesach.

17:20 Speaker 3 There was a lady staying on the south of the island, and she couldn't come to the Seder. We had publicized that we're giving out Seder kits, and she reached out through social media saying that she's on the island. She's staying at this hotel. Can she get a Seder kit, please? We, we didn't know much about her, and we sent with a taxi a Seder kit for her, and then we invited her to come to one of the day meals of Pesach, and she came to one of the empty meals, and she was sharing that she had just found out a few months before that she's Jewish. Her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor whom decided, like, "I'm done with Yiddishkeit, and I will not raise my children Jewish, and I don't want them to know they're Jewish." So she hid it their whole life, and now this lady in her 30s found out that her grandmother's actually Jewish, and she's actually Jewish. So she was on the island just, like, escaping everything and trying to process this new information. She read through the whole Haggadah. She never did this before. This was her first time sitting by a Jewish, like, anything.

18:23 Speaker 1 But the story didn't end there. The woman lives in a small town in England where there's no Chabad Shliach. The following Pesach-

18:32 Speaker 3 My husband reached out to the closest Shliach, who actually lives an hour drive away from her, and he put matzah in an Uber and sent matzah to her house for Pesach.

18:44 Speaker 1 After Pesach, the Supers received an email from the woman telling them that her grandmother had matzah for the first time since before the Holocaust. But Rabbi Avrohom Super says the focus remains on the people of Saint Lucia, where there have been challenges, like the availability of kosher food. So Rabbi Supers learned to shecht chickens, and he's worked with the local supermarkets to get the kosher items people actually use. Another challenge is getting necessary items for holidays and life events, which can take days or weeks to arrive in Saint Lucia, and even longer to clear customs.

19:26 Speaker 2 Everything has to be thought out in advance, and you've got to have everything there. It's a constant struggle. Your horseradish on Pesach, and your aravos on, on Sukkos, and your Hanukkah candles and Menorahs shipped in for Hanukkah.

19:41 Speaker 1 The Supers now offer programs that had never existed before on the island: a Hebrew school, bar and bat mitzvah lessons, women's programs, and hospital visitation. They're working on obtaining land for a Jewish cemetery, and a property that will allow them to move out of their Rodney Bay rental house and into their own building closer to the center of town, where they plan to build a mikvah and a kosher restaurant. They believe the local Jewish population is now about 200.

20:13 Speaker 2 The Jews that live on the island permanently, when we came eight years ago, were not very well connected to Jewish life. Today, almost all of them attend programming regularly, and we're connected to everyone, and everyone's part of the community.

20:26 Speaker 3 We don't have a big community, and I don't know if we ever will, but it has grown in the fact that these people are starting to come. And I really felt like privileged, like, "Wow, I get to be part of this."

20:40 Speaker 2 There's real people that are being affected. There's people's lives that are being changed.

20:44 Speaker 3 It would be beautiful if we end up with a big community, but as long as I have that one person to give to, then I'm happy.

20:53 Speaker 1 There's an inscription atop the Aron Kodesh at Chabad of Saint Lucia, Isaiah 60:9, which paints a prophetic picture of world redemption.

21:04 Speaker 2 "Ki li iyim yikavu lehavi banayich meracheik." For the islands will place their hope in me to bring your children from afar.

21:14 Speaker 1 The Supers say they've always believed that every Jew, even the farthest flung, yearns to connect with all of their heart and all of their soul.

21:24 Speaker 2 But after eight years, I've seen it. Whether they're looking for it consciously or not, their Neshama, their soul, is, is looking for that Jewish connection. Even the Jews on the little, tiny islands in the middle of the ocean.

21:43 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wollek. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast at L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. To subscribe digitally to Lubavitch International Magazine or to receive it at your doorstep, please visit lubavitch.com/subscribe. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.